Illuminating counsel for canine “caregivers.”
A service-dog trainer details a dog-teaching method heavy on respect, kindness, positive reinforcement and choice.
Arnold’s voice is assertive with experience—her insights into working with dogs are hard-won after years of close interaction. Though not a scientist, the author fashions a teaching regime based on canine behavior and aptitude. In her opinion, a solid, loving relationship between a human and a dog requires the human getting into the dog’s head. Understanding how a dog views the world is extremely rewarding. If you know how a dog’s eyes work, as well as the blessings and vulnerabilities of its auditory acuity and the communicative intent of body language and vocalizations, you will be able to appreciate and effectively guide a dog’s behavior. Likewise a dog’s emotional state and cognitive abilities—it’s no news to Arnold that dogs possess qualities like empathy, fairness, intention, personality, discriminating choice, telepathy and precognition, characteristics that she has seen with her own eyes, and backed up by preliminary controlled-experiment research. The force and surety of Arnold’s convictions is only rarely undermined by wayward assertions—e.g., that learning to carry a handbag is an “excellent example that dogs can retain and manipulate abstract images.” Mostly, though, the author’s storehouse of anecdotal evidence is telling and entertaining, and her demolition of various alpha-model and negative-reinforcement teaching techniques is thorough and lofty: “Shock collars are the tools of trainers not willing or able to use other, more humane methods.” For readers who do not possess ample time, patience, kindness and openness to lateral thinking, Arnold would suggest not getting a dog.
Illuminating counsel for canine “caregivers.”Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6888-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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